Presented by Italian Professor Kristin Phillips-Court, this seminar, focuses on Machiavelli’s frequent recourse to images of the Italian terrain as a means of communicating knowledge in The Prince and his other literary works. Phillips-Court's driving questions regard how Machiavelli’s descriptions and figurations of the land reveal the liminality of his thinking, which combined reasoned observation with a singular poetic imagination.

Through a selection of literary and visual references to female readership starting from the period of the Catholic Reformation, the talk will address modes of reading and of representing Italian women readers in the eighteenth century.

Professor Le Calvez’s particular specialty in genetic criticism: 2017 will be the year celebrating 160 years since the initial volume-publication of Madame Bovary. He is currently preparing a monograph dedicated to the “avant-textes” & “brouillons” of this same novel. Interaction with Prof. Le Calvez would provide our graduate students with a unique experience with this critical approach to literature that not only is asserting its importance in 19th-century studies, but to literary criticism as a whole.